Firehose Your Fears

So you don’t embarrass yourself in restaurants

The author at 13

My childhood taught me I was worthless. This is why, at the age of fourteen, when my first serious boyfriend punched me in the stomach at a fast-food counter because I couldn’t make up my mind what to order, I thought I deserved it. My friend Shep picked me up off the floor and took me to a separate table. He urged me to finish with my boyfriend. I didn’t know that being punched wasn’t normal. Maybe it was just part of being in a relationship? I genuinely didn’t know. But I thought I deserved it. Though I finished with that boyfriend on the spot (and then went to see the Buzzcocks¹ with him and Shep, because we had seats next to each other) by the next day I had accepted his tearful apologies and taken him back.

Because by fourteen, I had been trained to understand I was a third-class citizen. People say second, but second really wasn’t low enough. The adults were first, my step-sisters were second, my siblings and I were at the bottom. The detritus. This was demonstrated to us every single day by one of the most basic components of a human life: food.

When I was eight, my mother had moved us into a fancy Victorian townhouse with our new stepfather, a local GP, and the regime of what I came to call Food Apartheid began. The adults had good food. We had cheap food. My stepfather had Kellogg’s cornflakes. We had “Wavy Line” (the cheapest brand from the Spar). My stepfather had butter. We had one-litre tubs of cooking margarine from the Cash n’ Carry that smelled like engine oil. My stepfather had gold-top milk (creamy). We had silver top.

We were not under any circumstances to eat any of Colin’s food.

There were two separate food cupboards, one in each alcove either side of the chimney breast. To the left (a pale green), Colin’s cupboard, for so it was named. Here was all the exciting food, including tins of lychees, and of course the Kelloggs Cornflakes. To the right (a garish pink in our day), our cupboard containing own-brand cereals, marmite, jam, and lots of things beyond their recommended use-by dates, bought half price.

Colin’s cupboard to the left, our cupboard (tastefully repainted after we left home) to the right.

The adults ate separately, and had proper evening meals. We kids were fed at tea time and had bread and butter and jam. For ten years, bread and butter and jam. Mum said we only needed one cooked meal a day, and we had that at school. At weekends and in the holidays we’d have something hot: beans on toast or poached egg on toast or haddock and poached eggs on toast, or baked potatoes and cheese, and on the best days tuna casserole or spag bol. But mostly it was bread and butter and jam. And then at eight o’clock, my mum and stepfather would sit down to something delicious and meaty, with gravy and vegetables.

Except on Tuesdays and Saturdays. Those were the days our three stepsisters would visit. Though it was mostly still bread and butter and jam on Tuesdays, it would come with special jam and a special dessert, and on Saturdays, a proper cooked meal, because my stepfather would be present. But the pecking order still existed. In June, when we might be lucky enough to have strawberries and cream because my stepsisters were at the table, they would be served first. My three siblings and I would share out smaller portions of whatever was left: as I put it in my poem ‘The Means’, “the purple, squashy ones.” And with everyone else having been served lashings of single cream we’d be left, very often with the dregs… or no cream at all.

And the special jam? One of the moments that has gone down in sibling history was when my brother Peter, newly emboldened by the fact that he had cancer and had recently come home from having a piece of his hip bone removed, had the audacity to reach out and pick up the loganberry jam, which my stepfather had made himself. Colin had a way of starting most sentences with a kind of throat clearing and this is where I wish I had the chance to record this for you and do a Colin impression, but right now I am in Amsterdam, sans microphone. When he told my brother he could not have the loganberry jam, my brother asked ‘Why?’